


Insomniac - R Version

by westwingfanfictioncentral_archivist



Category: The West Wing
Genre: Angst, F/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2002-11-13
Updated: 2002-11-13
Packaged: 2019-05-15 10:58:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14789225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/westwingfanfictioncentral_archivist/pseuds/westwingfanfictioncentral_archivist
Summary: "If he just stays awake long enough, the dreams won't come."   What if Josh first got worse, instead of better, after the events ofNoel?





	Insomniac - R Version

**Author's Note:**

> A copy of this work was once archived at National Library, a part of the [ West Wing Fanfiction Central](https://fanlore.org/wiki/West_Wing_Fanfiction_Central), a West Wing fanfiction archive. More information about the Open Doors approved archive move can be found in the [announcement post](http://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/8325).

**Insomniac**

**by:** Carrie  


**Characters:** Donna, Josh  
**Category:** Angst and Romance, Songfic  
**Rating:** MATURE  
**Summary:** “If he just stays awake long enough, the dreams won’t come.”  What if Josh first got worse, instead of better, after the events of “Noel?”  
**Author's Notes:** Ok, “Noel” seems like a million years ago, I know.  But I wrote this months ago, when I couldn’t get Billy Pilgrim’s song “Insomniac,” out of my head, and thought it might fit the post-Noel period pretty well.  Hence, the following piece.  So, let’s take a trip back to yesteryear, before Amy, before Cliff, before MS...back when PTSD was all they had to worry about.  God I miss those days.  :-)   


* * *

> _*I can see you and I don't even know you,_  
>  falling into the sheets at night.  
>  Place my hand flat on my chest;  
>  I feel the heart beat back the night.*

****

11:24pm.

If he just stays awake long enough, the dreams won’t come. 

But if the dreams don’t come, he won’t get any sleep.

And he’s so tired.

He can see himself laying there...the exhaustion allows him to float right out of himself, separating his mind from his body, letting him look down from above...and he doesn’t recognize the frightened, sweaty, wounded man he sees twisted in the sheets below.  The man whose eyes are wide and blinded by fear.

His heart’s beating like he’s had one of the nightmares...pumping so hard he’s afraid he’ll undo all the repair work on his ruptured artery.  He begins to see, with his tortured mind, blood, blood everywhere, pulsing so hard it explodes, ripping through the reconstruction work, spurting through the sutures, spilling and seeping into his chest cavity, filling, filling, drowning him...oh God...oh...

 “He...oh, God, help!  Donna, please...!”

Josh sat straight up, shouting, gasping to fill his once-damaged lungs with new air.  Sweat trickled down his back.  He ran shaking hands over his face.  He had a nightmare about having a nightmare.  _Well, that’s a new horror_ , he thought with despair.  Nice to see his tormented mind was still able to be creative.

He lay back down.  _She’ll be here later tonight,_ he reminded himself, holding onto that one last link to his sanity.  _Later tonight later tonight later later later_...he latched onto the words like a tow line, pulling him to shore.  He clenched his hands into fists, and then winced as his bandaged, stitched hand throbbed and burned.  

It had been two days since his all-day session with Stanley at the White House, and he knew that once the holidays were over, he’d be able to meet with a local shrink.  But until then, he was on his own...and he wasn’t doing so well.  

And once again, when his life was falling apart, Donna put her own life on hold to take care of him.

She had been by his side since the trip to the hospital two nights ago; once again, she moved into his home, slept on his couch, and made everything a little easier.  When the sun was shining, she made him smile, she chattered on about nothing and everything; she filled his mind with things that edged out the incessant, scary clatter within his psyche.  In the quiet dead of night, however, when she slept on his lumpy couch, he could not escape the atonal symphony of pain playing in his brain.

A few hours earlier, Donna had headed out for a while, to go back to her apartment and get some clothes, pay her bills, make some phone calls.  She promised to be back as soon as possible.  Once she left, after trying to get control of himself, after his first panic attack of the evening, he suddenly realized that she’d missed Christmas.  She was supposed to fly home on Christmas Eve, home for her first week’s vacation in god knows how long.  And she didn’t even bring it up.  She just stayed with him.  She was probably going home to call her parents and try to explain why she failed to come home like she was supposed to.  Josh was now wracked with guilt on top of everything else.

He wished it could all be simpler.  He wished she could just be there all the time, he wished she could share his bed, he wished she were his...

Josh pressed his eyes closed tightly against the images the word “wife” conjured up.  Donna in a white dress, Donna saying she would love him, always, Donna naked beneath his worshipping hands....  Sadly, those things could never be.  _They_ could never be.  He didn’t know if he’d ever be whole again.  Besides, he was quite sure that his fragile mind wouldn’t be able to take it if she didn’t want him the way he wanted her.  Josh didn’t think doctors could fix that sort of damage.  He didn’t trust himself to survive it. So he could never let her know.  And thus he’d continue to take from her whatever she constantly, unselfishly gave to him.

He placed his hands, one on top of the other, flat on his chest, covering his heart, and he willed that muscle to keep going, to beat back the night, to keep the images and the darkness and the pain and the sweat and the fear away from the brain it was so connected to.  He clutched his hands as tight as he could bear over the still-red incision line...to keep the comforting idea of Donna as _his_ as close inside as he could right now.  _She’ll be here soon,_ he thought, pulling the bedsheet into the fingers clutched at his chest.  He rolled on his side and faced the desk and window.  _Soon._

> _*I've tried counting sheep and I've talked to the shepherd;_  
>  and played with my pillow forever and ever.  
>  I sit alone and I watch the clock.  
>  I breathe in on the tick and out on the tock...*

****

1:10am

Josh had gotten so good at fearing sleep and the dreams that came with it, that he had now forgotten _how_ to fall asleep.  How had he managed it so effortlessly for so many years?  He could always sleep.  He was a champion sleeper.  He could sleep on planes, on trains, on buses, at his desk; he once fell asleep standing up.  Now, he had tried everything he could to make mindless, restful sleep come, and still it eluded him.  No matter how he tried to wear out his intellect, it showed a resiliency that he knew would make him go mad.  Wide awake or fast asleep, he could not quiet his mind; it raced, it screamed, it tumbled, it roared, it pounded, it taunted him, it throbbed, it hurt.  The blinding white noise of his consciousness crowded out everything else.

He could barely remember the person he was before the shooting – the man who couldn’t stop talking, who loved the sound of his own intelligent voice and the workings of his clever political mind.  Now all he wanted was silence.  And peace. 

He tried everything he could think of to quiet his thoughts, to stop the brainwaves from misfiring and creating a cacophony of mental sound that kept him awake until, every night, he passed out, exhausted from the war...and then woke within hours to the drum beat of another nightmare.  He tried to focus, like the shrink had suggested, on...anything else.  Anything besides the noise, the blood, the shots ringing out.  Anything calming.  One night he tried to focus on the ocean.  Gentle waves lapping at a soft-sand shore.  But whatever image he used to soothe his mind only came back to haunt him later in the darkness.  A vision of himself bobbing peacefully on the waves of the ocean became, in the night, images of himself drowning in a sea-storm of blood.  The pictures flashed with a staccato beat across the screen behind his eyes.

The night before, he was so desperate that he had begun counting sheep.  He had visualized a bucolic field on a warm sunny day, and watched the fluffy sheep hurdling the fence.  But then Josh realized that he had started talking to their damn shepherd about the President’s agenda for supporting agricultural subsidies and America’s small farmers.  He lost control of his own calming visualization technique, for the love of God.  Was there any question that he was losing his mind?  _I mean, a conversation,with the *fucking shepherd_ ,* he thought to himself.  Insanity.  As the sheep finally helped him doze off, those harmless images eventually turned to visions, too real to be imagined, of being lost in the wilderness in the cold of night, rabid animals chasing him, dark men with guns right behind.  

Tonight, he could not get comfortable, no matter how he tried to refashion his pillow...bent in half, length-wise, or clutched to his chest; it didn’t matter, nothing seemed to work.   His sheets always wound up strangling his legs or his arms as he flailed about; he was cold, but he couldn’t bear to have the covers constricting him.  Lying face-down on his chest made him feel like he was suffocating, whether awake or asleep.  On his back, the ceiling presented a blank canvas for the devil to paint his horrors upon.  So Josh lay on his side, looking out through his bedroom towards his front door, where Donna would eventually be. 

And now he had thought about it too much, and he was too afraid to close his eyes, so he stared at the clock sideways and watched the minutes click by.  To calm his heart, to steady it, he tried to breathe in tandem with the tick-tock of the clock.  It never worked; his heart beat faster and more irregularly than time itself when he was like this.

> _*I can hear your bare feet on the kitchen floor_  
>  and I don't have to have these dreams no more;  
>  and I've found someone just to hold  me tight...  
>  to hold the insomniac all night.*

****

1:24am.

Donna tried to be as quiet as possible as she slipped her key into the lock.  Sliding the dead bolt back into the door, she then slowly turned the knob, willing the joints not to squeak as she slipped inside, closed and then bolted the door from within.  She slipped out of her jacket and hung it on the coat rack next to the door.  She toed off her sneakers, and slipped wearily into Josh’s kitchen.  She poured herself a glass of water and brought it to her mouth with a shaking hand.

She hadn’t gone home.

She had instead sat in the prayer chapel at the Episcopalian church around the corner, on a cold wooden bench, alone, and cried for five hours, keening for the man she feared she was losing.  

She had bargained with God, again.  The first time was when Josh was in the hospital after the shooting.   That first time, it was a very long, one-sided discussion where Donna demanded that Josh’s life be spared, angrily reminding God that Josh would do more good alive, annoying people on earth, than dead somewhere else.

Tonight, she was much humbler, and much more desperate.  For as scared as she was back in August, this was much, much worse now.  In August, he was crawling back to life.  Now, he was slipping away from her, slowly, steadily; she could see it happening and she didn’t know how to stop it. She heard him, the past few nights, not sleeping, crying out in his dreams; she saw that he wasn’t sleeping, saw that he was haunted, saw that he was on the edge of something, and that he looked ready to jump overinto oblivion.  So she bargained with God again, for Josh’s life, for his sanity, for peace of mind, for him to be himself again.  She promised all the things she thought God would want to hear, and meant them, if it meant Josh would become Josh again.

She let out a deep, shuddering breath, finished the water, and walked silently through the apartment to peek through Josh’s bedroom door.

She found him on his side, sheets clutched to his chest, looking out through the open bedroom door at her.  And his eyes held a mix of relief, gratitude, fear and exhaustion that broke her heart in two again.

“Josh.  Are you ok?” she whispered, bending at the knees so that she was face to face with the man she loved, but whose emotional walls would not let her in.

He honestly had no idea how he was anymore.  But all he knew was that he must have dozed off again, and for the first time in weeks, he had woken up not to a nightmare, but to the sound of her feet sliding across his kitchen floor.  He knew that with her, he was safe, and the feeling of relief that washed over him when he heard her overwhelmed him.

He remained silent, but then reached one arm out, slowly, to her face.  He watched his fingers move to her, in blurry slow-motion, like he was underwater.  He touched her cheekbone tentatively, with shaking fingertips.  He didn’t know how else to express the gratitude he felt for her without coming completely undone.  Donna thought it seemed like he wanted to make sure she was real.  

Tears pooled in his eyes, as he stared and lightly touched her face.  Donna, overwhelmed, took her own hand and pulled Josh’s palm flush against her cheek.  She dropped a soft kiss into the sensitive center of his bandaged hand...and snapped what was left of his control.  He covered his face with his fingers and wept.  Wept for his exhaustion, and pain, and fear, and for how broken he was, and for all the feelings for this woman that he could never truly reveal, and for his patched up, damaged heart, for it all.  

She was stunned, and desperate to make it all stop.  So many nights she had wanted to hold him, warm him, comfort him, love him, but was afraid to let him see her heart so plainly.  She couldn’t resist any more.  She climbed into his bed, and pulled his sweaty, sobbing, exhausted body to her own.  He curled himself around her, crying into her neck; his arms snaked around her back, his fingers wove themselves into her hair.  Shaking violently, he pushed his face into her chest, nearer to her heart, to hear something steady, to feel her constancy and solidity.  She shushed, she rocked, she ran her fingers through his hair, she soothed, she murmured, she stroked his back and arms.  She cried too.  “Please don’t leave me,” each cried at some point, each meaning different things.

She quieted him.  Her scent and warmth comforted him.

Exhausted, they slept.

> _*Dig my head down deep so I can't hear the cars_  
>  outside on the street...  
>  and the stars are laughing...  
>  They get a kick out of my misery.*

****

3:35am

And now he dreamt of the one thing he feared the most.  That she was right there, right in front of him, and he couldn’t touch her, see her, be with her, hold her, love her.  That dream came in a variety of terrifying forms.  In one, she stood on the deck of a boat that was sailing away, and he stood on shore, and had no voice to call to her.  In another, she stood in front of her desk in the bullpen, all her belongings packed into a box, looking into his eyes, saying goodbye...and he couldn’t tell her he loved her, that he needed her, that he’d die without her, that his heart wasn’t whole without her.  And so he had to watch her walk away.  Then, in the most horrible dream of all, he dreamed that _she_ was the one who was there, at Rosslyn, and he was running, running, running to get to her, because if he didn’t, then _her_ heart, that strong, wonderful, giving heart, would be ripped in two by bullets in the dark...running, breath coming in painful gasps, he rounded the corner, heard the shot, felt the blood, saw her face hit the ground...

...and Josh jerked awake, bringing the ragged breathing of the nightmare into his waking reality.  _She’s ok.  She’s right here._   She was with him.  She hadn’t left him. She was asleep on her side, her arms curled around his arm, her top leg linked over his own.  He listened to her breathe, and tried to match her pattern, to slow down his own pulse.  He watched her sleep the restful sleep she deserved, and was glad that she had it.  She was beautiful in the moonlight.  _She’s beautiful anywhere_.  

And the sadness of his dream, that he couldn’t touch her, couldn’t have her, couldn’t love her with his torn-up mind and soul and heart, overwhelmed him.  He dug one ear into his pillow, and covered the other with his hand, to keep out the clamor that threatened to pour back in to the hollow spaces of his mind.  He hated hearing the cars down on the street – people with a purpose, headed somewhere, going places, even at this late hour.  More noise.  He had an irrational hatred for those people down there, in their cars.  They were moving, they had a destination, and he was stuck in place, standing still, and not standing very well at all.

He slipped from her, leaving the bed, looking back at her warm body.  She hadn’t even gotten out of her clothes when she crawled in to hold him.  He noticed how deep the circles under her eyes had become.  _I did that to her,_ he screamed inside.  He stripped off his T-shirt, soaked with sweat, leaving his boxers on.  Josh dragged himself away from her, and headed out into his kitchen.  He stood in front of the double windows as he held onto the sink counter, and tried to get a grip on himself.  He swung his eyes to the heavens outside, narrowing them in anger at the bright celestial lights that winked and nodded above.  _They’re laughing_ , he thought, his mind hinging again on the line between lucidity and madness.  _They get a kick out of my misery.  They bathe her in light.  I only get the dark emptiness between them._   He looked down at the jagged scar on his chest; it was hidden by night shadows, but he knew only too well that it was there.

> _*I've tried everything short of Aristotle,_  
>  to Dramamine and the whiskey in the bottle;  
>  I pray for the day when my ship comes in...  
>  when I...can sleep...the sleep...of the just...again...*

Desperate, he looked around in his kitchen.  His anxiety pills were in the bathroom.  He knew he should go get them.  But instead his bleary eyes and mind focused on the bottle of Jack Daniels in the corner of the pantry.  He’d tried everything else.  Visualizing.  Relaxing.  Counting the fucking sheep.  Trying to tire his mind.  One night he even tried to translate a passage from one of his old classics textbooks –  that had always knocked him out in an instant in college.  Not anymore.  He had tried a number of different sleep medications – he even tried downing some of the Dramamine he had from God knows when in his medicine cabinet, to stop the room from spinning one night.  It just made him dizzier.  Nothing.  Nothing set him free.  Nothing dulled the pain.  Nothing made it quiet.

He moved to the whiskey bottle, grabbed it in his right hand, and pulled a glass from the shelf in his left.  He twisted the cap off, poured a full glass, and prayed it would be the one thing to help make everything dull.  He reached for the drink...

...and then he heard her, behind him.

> _*I can hear your bare feet on the kitchen floor_  
>  and I don't have to have these dreams no more  
>  and I've found someone just to hold  me tight...  
>  to hold the insomniac all night.*

She saw what he was about to do.

She went to him, standing at the windows, his back to her, and where he saw darkness, she saw light from the stars caressing his hair and eyes.  She wrapped her arms around him from behind, and pressed herself flat against him from head to toe.  He went rigid, then whimpered and slumped into her embrace.  It was too much.  She turned him to face her, and he wouldn’t meet her eyes.  He was defeated.  He shook.  He didn’t want her to see him this low.  He pulled his hands up to cover his face; he leaned back weakly against the counter.  She didn’t speak.  She reached around him, grabbed the glass, and poured the whiskey down the drain.  

“Look at me,” she told him, quietly.

He pulled his hands together on his face, dragged his fingers across his eyelids, and with all of his strength, dropped them to his sides, in fists, and lifted his head to meet her gaze.  She walked forward until she was a whisper away from him.  He could feel her breath on his chest.  Her eyes were full of strength, passion and compassion, and love, and they burned for him.  And she quietly decided that she only had one last way to try to help save him:  she could lay bare her heart to him.

So she began unbuttoning the long-sleeved shirt that she had on.  Slowly.  One by one, the buttons slipped through the buttonholes.  The bluish light of night caressed each new inch of skin she revealed.  He watched her, and a spark of hope where there had been none flickered in his ravaged mind.

She unbuttoned her jeans, eased them over her hips, and let them drop and pool at her feet.  She stepped out of them, then slipped the open shirt off her shoulders.  It fluttered and floated to the floor.  She stood before him in pieces of white lace.  _Like a bride_ , he thought.  She reached behind her and unhooked the bra, and she let it fall.  She hooked her thumbs in the sides of her panties, and peeled them down her legs.  She stood bare before him.  She reached over, and pulled his boxers down and out from under his feet.  His eyes caressed her body; his hands ached to do the same.

“Josh.  Look at me,” she whispered again.  “Look at us.”  She reached out, took his left hand in hers, and brought his palm up to cup her left breast, holding him there with her right hand until he could begin to feel the rhythm of her heart beating.  She took her left hand and placed it over the scar on his heart, and he covered her hand with his own.  They looked in to each other’s eyes.  They both tasted tears.  “You’ve let me take care of you.  Now let me help heal you, Josh,” she whispered, as he leaned his forehead down to rest against hers.  

They stood in the blue light of night, with nothing between them, holding onto each other’s hearts.  He felt his pulse begin to slow, and to synchronize with her own, and grow stronger because of it; he felt his mind clearing, unspooling, becoming lighter, somehow.  “Do you feel that, Josh?  Do you feel how alive you are?” she demanded.  “You don’t have to have those dreams any more,” she whispered, tilting her head up to meet his mouth with her own.  “You never have to have those dreams again,” she said again, willing him to believe her.  She moved her mouth over his chin, his cheeks, his closed eyes, and back to his mouth.  She spoke quietly against his lips.  “I’m right here. I’ll hold you all night, while you sleep, until you wake up.  Let me in.  Let me heal you.  Let me love you, Josh,” she said, pleading, convincing him that she could.

They fell against each other, arms now moving over the other, exploring; their hearts beating against the other’s chest.  Their lips moved across the other’s mouth, eyes, neck, fingers, muscles, skin.  Donna led him back through the apartment to the bed of his nightmares, and sanctified the space by refusing to let the darkness in.  In the light of the night sky she cleansed him and his mind, by loving every inch of him with her mouth and hands.  She kissed her way from his neck to his arms, down his torso and abdomen; she worshipped his legs, the backs of his knees.  His skin was pulsing with energy, even the dead area around the scar.  He finally felt alive.

When his arms started reaching for her, she caught his hands in hers, and stilled him with a finger against his lips.  He looked into her eyes, and found strength and love reflected back.  Laying over him, she looked back into his eyes, then leaned down, and pressed her lips to the scar over his heart.

And for one long moment, his pulse stopped.  Everything stopped.  His mind cleared.  Everything was finally very, very quiet.

She kissed the scar, wept over it, exorcised it, healed it.  And then his heart began to beat again.  

He sat up to hold her in his arms as they began to move together, and the feel of her, the warmth of her, the smell of her, the love from her helped wipe his mind clear of pain, of noise, of anything but her. His fingers got lost in her hair.  He slid them from her head, and slipped his hands up and down her arms, reached behind her to press her to him more tightly.  

“Can you feel me, Josh?” she asked, over and over.  

“Yes.” 

He rolled her over, and now loved her with his body.  She sighed and called his name in the night, over and over again.

> _*I can hear your bare feet on the kitchen floor_  
>  and I don't have to have these dreams no more  
>  and I've found someone just to hold  me tight...   
>  to hold the insomniac all night.*

****

5:55am.

One by one, the stars disappeared.

And the sun began to shine.

She sighed against his chest, and whispered “I love you” to his weary mind and soul.

And she pulled him to her, and held him in her arms.

And he whispered, “Thank you, Donnatella,” against her beating heart...

And it was quiet...

And he settled...

And he drifted...

And then he slept.

> _*Hold the insomniac all night..._  
>  Hold the insomniac all night...  
>  Hold the insomniac all night...  
>  Hold the insomniac all night...  
>     
>  Oh hold me, keep on holding me  
>  Oh hold me, keep on holding me  
>  Hold me...  
>  I can keep on dreaming...  
>  I can sleep...  
>  Hold me.*


End file.
